Four days in Interlaken: the mountains everybody means when they say Switzerland

Arrive, drop the bags and walk out onto the Höhematte, the meadow in the middle of town. It has been kept empty since the nineteenth century for one reason, which is the view south: a gap in the green hills, and behind it the snow, sitting improbably above a town not much above five hundred metres.

Spend the afternoon working out what you are looking at, because it makes the next three days legible. The pointed white summit in the gap is the one the whole region is named after, and the railways you will be using run up either side of the ridge below it.

Then eat early. The grand café on the meadow has been feeding visitors since the days when they arrived by paddle steamer, and it is the one place in town with a bit of history to it.

Take the first train up to Lauterbrunnen. The valley is a trench: flat green floor, vertical grey walls, and water coming off the top of them in long white ribbons. The village claims seventy-two waterfalls, and the one behind the church, Staubbach, drops nearly three hundred metres in a single fall that the wind turns to smoke halfway down. A path runs up behind it, so you can stand under the fall and look out through it.

Walk or take the bus a few kilometres up the valley to Trümmelbach. This is the strange one: ten more falls, but inside the mountain, carrying the meltwater off the three big peaks at twenty thousand litres a second. A lift built into the rock takes you up to galleries cut alongside the water, and the noise in there is extraordinary.

In the afternoon, cross the valley and go up. The cable car from Stechelberg lifts you to Gimmelwald, a hamlet of farms and hay barns on a shelf of grass with no road to it, where the cows outnumber the buildings and the view is straight across at the peaks. Walk the half hour uphill to the next village for a bigger choice of dinner, or come back down for the evening.

The other branch of the railway goes to Grindelwald, which sits in a bowl of pasture directly beneath the north face. From the village, a long gondola line climbs to First, a ridge at about 2,200 metres with a metal walkway bolted along the cliff below the station. It hangs out over nothing, and it is the sort of thing that either delights you or does not.

From the top the paths are gentle and well made. An hour's easy walk gets you to a lake that holds the reflection of the whole range on a still morning, and you can carry on down on foot for as long as your knees are willing before picking up the gondola again.

Save the afternoon for the pass. A yellow postbus grinds up the road east of the village to Grosse Scheidegg, a saddle of grass at nearly two thousand metres with cowbells, a mountain inn and the wall of rock at your shoulder. Ride it up and walk down, which is the way round everybody who has done it recommends.

The line towards Lucerne runs along Lake Brienz, and twenty minutes out there is a good reason to break the journey. Ballenberg is a hillside onto which old buildings from every part of Switzerland have been moved and rebuilt: farmhouses, a sawmill, a cheese dairy, barns, all of them furnished and most of them open.

It sounds worthy and it is not. People are working in the buildings, the animals are the old breeds, and walking from a Ticino stone house to a Bernese timber farm in twenty minutes tells you more about how this country fits together than any museum in a city.

Allow three hours, take the bus from Brienz station, and pick up a later train onward. If you are heading the other way, towards Bern or Geneva, skip it and use the morning on the lake in Interlaken instead.